Poetry For Children Research Articles

The Activist Archive and Social Justice Agendas: Considering the Role of the Ken Saro-Wiwa Archive in Micro-Minority Identity in the Niger Delta

Between 1990 and 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa led a prominent peaceful campaign for the recognition and just treatment of his community by the military dictatorship of General Abacha. As author and activist, he wrote - and generally self-published - across a huge range of genres: novels, plays, short stories, children's tales, poetry, histories, political tracts, diaries, satires, and newspaper columns. He used the versatility of the written medium to speak out internationally about the abuses suffered by his small Niger Delta minority community, the Ogoni. Meanwhile, his efforts at home as leader of MOSOP, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, helped to mobilise a mass protest, 300,000-strong, against Shell Oil in January 1993, following which the company withdrew from the area. He was hanged on 10th November 1995 on trumped-up murder charges along with eight fellow Ogoni activists.

Three Tales for Emmie: Joan Wise’s Forgotten Tasmanian Triptych

Joan Wise made her fiction debut in pages of Australia's Bulletin magazine in 1950. poem of hers had earlier appeared in same publication, but her arrival as a writer of prose announced by a series of linked tales, Conquest of (January), Poison in Furrow (May), and A Fence for Emma (August). The stories are a subtly comic triptych about gender politics and hardscrabble bush-farming in remote Central Highlands district of Tasmania.We discovered Joan Wise by chance, while trawling archives during early stages of editing Deep South: Stories from Tasmania (2012).1 One of our intentions in editing anthology to re-present to contemporary reader a selection of best Tasmanian stories that had for decades languished unread in back issues of journals and magazines. More than sixty after original publication of Wise's stories, they struck us as original, witty, and of remarkable interest to contemporary reader.Born Joan Boyd in Tasmania in 1912, Wise educated at St Michael's Collegiate School, a private Anglican girls' school in Hobart, and following her graduation trained as a Mothercraft nurse. At age of twenty, she met and married Archibald (Arch) Wise, a farmer from Plenty, a small town in Tasmania's Derwent Valley. Following her marriage, Wise took over management of farmhouse at Kinvarra, a substantial sheep- and hop-producing property, combining demands of this role with raising three daughters and trying to establish a career as a writer. While Wise's publications span four decades, her writing fragmented and her output sporadic. The first flush of her publishing career came between 1946 and 1950 when she focused on producing poetry and short fiction for an adult audience. The 1950 publication of Emmie stories, when Wise thirty-eight old, might have heralded emergence of a strong new voice in Australian fiction, but immediately following their publication, Wise seems to have disappeared from view. When she reemerged on publishing scene fifteen later, it as an author of children's poetry and fiction. Between 1965 and 1978, Wise produced two children's novels, Trapped on Tasman (1971) and The Silver Fish (1972), as well as numerous shorter works that appeared in School Magazine (published by New South Wales Department of Education since 1916) and various anthologies. During final phase of her career, Wise confided in a letter to an editor at Writers' Radio that she now not able to write for children, although her reasons for this conclusion remain unclear. Her last written works were fragments of autobiographical nonfiction that were never published but possibly intended for radio broadcast. They tell of period of her in which she cared for her husband after he suffered two strokes and-together with her correspondence-paint a picture of a woman torn between concern for her husband and frustration at lack of time she is able to devote to her writing.Wise's biographical profile is remarkably similar to those of Australian writers who are subjects of Susan Sheridan's group biography, Nine Lives. Judith Wright, Thea Astley, Gwen Harwood, Elizabeth Jolley, Amy Witting, Jessica Anderson, Rosemary Dobson, Dorothy Hewett, and Dorothy Auchterlonie Green were all born between 1915 and 1925, and each of them achieved success between mid-1940s and 1970s. Sheridan is interested in why some of them (Jolley, Witting, Anderson) did not publish until middle age and why others (Dobson, Hewett, Green) started strongly as poets in 1940s, but either reduced their output or fell silent for next twenty years (back cover). Literature, writes Sheridan, was a particularly unwelcoming and uncertain profession for women (5) in immediate postwar period, time when Wise seeking a foothold for her fiction. The ideologically driven ousting of from public life (5), chauvinism of established literary gatekeepers, dominance of Cold War politics (in which relatively few writers participated), and personal circumstances of individual women-who usually combined the artistic with domestic (2)-are among interlocking cultural, social, and political factors that Sheridan offers as an explanation for partial occlusion of Australian women's writing at that time. …

THE FORMATION OF DAGESTAN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY TRANSLATION

The paper analyzes the problems of Dagestan children's literature in the context of the adequacy of literary transla-tion, the main stages and trends in children's prose and poetry of the peoples of Dagestan. The author points to such aspects of the problem as: the lack of a unified ap-proach to the theory of translation, clear distinction be-tween adaptation and translation, the necessity of taking into consideration multilingualism and other features of the mentality.

Women Writers, Nineteenth Century Nursery Rhyme and Lyric Innovation

AbstractFrom “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” to “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, some of the most recognizable children's verse in the English language was written by nineteenth century women poets. A close look at this tradition of original nursery rhyme reveals that it is surprisingly experimental and that it enhances our understanding of the ways in which women writers from this period negotiated the relations between gender, genre and authorship. Indeed, children's verse constitutes important evidence of a tradition of generic innovation and lyric experimentation by women writers, who use juvenile poetry to expand the formal potential of the lyric, adapting the conventions of oral verse to develop a new poetic voice for women. More specifically, women writers of juvenile verse develop a lyric voice capable of expressing the complexities of one of the central aspects of nineteenth century female experience: motherhood. The tradition of original nursery rhyme is dominated by mothers. This is not to say that all women who wrote children's verse were literally mothers but that children's poetry from this period has both a maternal context – women reading to preliterate children – and is voiced by maternal speakers. Through an examination of the collaborative Romantic‐era poets Ann and Jane Taylor and the American poet Eliza Lee Follen, the maternal speaker emerges as of central importance to women's poetry. Not only do women writers use maternal speakers to authorize their entry into the commercial literary marketplace, but these writers also use various aspects of maternal experience, including voice and sound, to push the boundaries of the lyric.

KARAKTERISTIK PANTUN ACEH

The objective of this study is to describe characteristics of Aceh verse. The description covers: (1) number of verses per couplet, (2) long and short verse, (3) content of verse, and (4) poetical nuance of verse. Data of this study were obtained from document of Aceh’s verse and SMS. The study reveals that each couplet of Aceh verse consists of verses that varies from: 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12 verses. Relying upon its length, Aceh verses may consist of a one-complete sentence verse and some couplets verses or a brief story. Contents of Aceh verses are classified into: (1) religious verses, (2) advice verses, (3) tradition verses, (4) fate verses, (5) young verses, (6) joke verses, (7) kidding verses, (8) condolences verses, (9) happiness verses, (10) children verses, and (11) seumapa verses. Based on poetical nuances, a perfect Aceh’s verse should advice coherent rhymes and rhythms (pakhok and buhu) incorporating intended message, couplets and contents.

Students are moving towards god of knowledge, pursuing for the truth: On children's poetry by Vladislav Petkovic Dis

This paper is on the insufficiently analysed poems for children by Vladislav Petkovic Dis. They are being enlightened in the context of the magazine they were published in (Mala Srbadija) and biographical data from life of Dis. Poems are observed from the context of development of Serbian poetry for children, focusing primarily at the particularities of their expression and authenticity of the view of children. In a few poems for children by Dis, there were different poetical possibilities in forming certain topics and motifs in connection with the children's world. This is why in the poems for children by Dis, there is a child as a lyrical voice or an adult addressing children not with the purpose of teaching them, mocking them, but gives advice, directs them and favours them in comparison to the world of adults. Very clear picture of the school is particularly expressed, representing learning, knowledge, dominantly warm, almost idealized notion about the child given by the poems about nature or poems about national identity.

The Consciousness of Time in Poetry for Children and Approaches to Teaching

The Consciousness of Time in Poetry for Children and Approaches to Teaching

“Brave Young Singers”: children's poetry-writing and 1930s Australian distance education

Purpose– There has been virtually no explication of poetry-writing pedagogy in historical accounts of Australian distance education during the 1930s. The purpose of this paper is to satisfy this gap in scholarship.Design/methodology/approach– The paper concerns a particular episode in the cultural history of education; an episode upon which print media of the 1930s sheds a distinctive light. The paper therefore draws extensively on 1930s press reports to: contextualise the key educational debates and prime-movers inspiring verse-writing pedagogy in Australian education, particularly distance education, in order to; concentrate specific attention on the creation and popular reception ofBrave Young Singers(1938), the first and only anthology of children's poetry written entirely by students of the correspondence classes of Western Australia.Findings– Published under the auspices of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) with funds originating from the Carnegie Corporation, two men in particular proved crucial to the development and culmination ofBrave Young Singers. As the end result of a longitudinal study conducted by James Albert Miles with the particular support of Frank Tate, the publication attracted acclaim as a research document promoting ACER's success in educational research investigating the “experiment” of poetry-writing instruction through correspondence schooling.Originality/value– The paper pays due critical attention to a previously overlooked anthology of Australian children's poetry while simultaneously presenting an original account of the emergence and implementation of verse-writing instruction within the Australian correspondence class curriculum of the 1930s.

Over the river and through the wood: an anthology of nineteenth-century American children's poetry

Over the River and Through the Wood is the first and only collection of its kind, offering readers an unequaled view of the quality and diversity of nineteenth-century American children's poetry. Most American poets wrote for children - from famous names such as Ralph Waldo Emerson to less familiar figures like Christina Moody, an African American author who published her first book at sixteen. In its excellence, relevance, and abundance, much of this work rivals or surpasses poetry written for adults, yet it has languished - inaccessible and unread - in old periodicals, gift books, and primers. This groundbreaking anthology remedies that loss, presenting material that is both critical to the tradition of American poetry and also a delight to read. Complemented by period illustrations, this definitive collection includes work by poets from all geographical regions, as well as rarely seen poems by immigrant and ethnic writers and by children themselves. Karen L. Kilcup and Angela Sorby have combed the archives to present an extensive selection of rediscoveries along with traditional favorites. By turns playful, contemplative, humorous, and subversive, these poems appeal to modern sensibilities while giving scholars a revised picture of the nineteenth-century literary landscape.

Case studies of historic soundscapes with cultural importance

Case studies discussed include Bow Bells, in which the sounds of ringing bells of the East London church of St. Mary Le Bow became a soundmark that defined the ”Cockney” ethnicity. (A “Cockney” is a person born within the sound of Bow Bells.) With London's growth, more churches were built. The combined sounds of their bells became the community soundscape for East London. It inspired beloved children's poetry (Oranges and Lemons … Says the great Bell of Bow). That children's poem was learned by generations of English children, and the poem became the sound symbol for all of England. This became very important in WWII when Nazi arial bombing destroyed Bow Bells creating a serious morale problem for England. To reassure their countrymen that the “home fires” were still burning, BBC used a 1926 sound recording of Bow Bells as an interval signal in their worldwide radio broadcasts. On a smaller scale, accidental whispering arches can give buildings “a sense of place.” A 6th C monastery at Clonmacnoise, Ireland, has a large and elaborately carved door installed that became a storied whispering archway. The storied accidental whispering archways at Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania's West Chester University are also described.

LEXICO-SEMANTIC ASPECTS OF THE ANTHROPONYMS

The purpose of this paper is studying of the poetic onomasticon of R.Minin, defining the role of onomastic system in creating linguostylistic structure of the works, the description of the aspects of text’s space, the novelty of the research is to generalize the author’s numerous works, offers his own vision of a problem "in the name of a literary text," and also devoted to issues specific implementation of expressive possibilities of anthroponyms in children's poetry.

Children's oral poetry: A reflection on the role of Imilolozelo (lullabies) as Art Performance in Zulu

Imilolozelo (lullabies) form part of Zulu children's poetry that is probably the most ancient form of African children's literature. It includes the poetry and folksongs of societies whose literature was transmitted orally. Like all folklore, children's oral poetry is an art performance and tradition transmitted from one's forefathers. Children's oral poetry is characterised by song, repetition, physical actions and gestures. The performance nature of imilolozelo can be likened to an informal school where, from infancy, a child slowly discovers her/his world and some aspects of all that is in it. On remarking about oral performance Okpewho points out that ‘There must be a certain appeal in not what the performer is saying but in the way it is said.. much of the appeal lies in the quality of the voice used and the skill with which the speaker manipulates the tones of the words involved.’ Zulu traditional oral poetry, like all African poetry, was not composed to be read silently or aloud; instead, it was always meant to be heard by the ear and its actions perceived and appreciated with the eyes. The oral element focuses on performance and sound whereas the written form is text-centred. The performance of imilolozelo or ‘cradle songs’, as Weinberg calls them, was intended not only to entertain children or while away time. They were composed also to teach and bring people together. The aim of this paper is to show that in ancient Zulu societies, the performance of imilolozelo as an oral art form was not only used to lull a child to sleep but it also also had other important roles to play in the upbringing, socialisation and development of a child.

The Meaning of Children's Poetry: A Cognitive Approach

Critical attention to children's poetry has been hampered by the lack of a clear sense of what a children's poem is and how children's poetry should be valued. Often, it is seen as a lesser genre in comparison to poetry written for adults. This essay explores the premises and contradictions that inform existing critical discourse on children's poetry and asserts that a more effective way of viewing children's poetry can be achieved through cognitive poetics rather than through comparisons with adult poetry. Arguing that children's poetry preserves the rhythms and pleasures of the body in language and facilitates emotional and physical attunement with others, the essay examines the crucial role children's poetry plays in creating a holding environment in language to help children manage their sensory environments, map and regulate their neurological functions, contain their existential anxieties, and participate in communal life.

The Meaning of Parallelism in Children's Poetry to Rhythm Education

The Meaning of Parallelism in Children's Poetry to Rhythm Education

"Lick a Stamp, Lick the Kaiser": Sensing the Federal Government in Children's Lives during World War I: Winner of the 2012 JSH Student Essay Competition

This article explores how the federal government mobilized American citizens during World War I by turning to their sensory experiences, particularly taste and sight. Through the Treasury Department and the United States Food Administration, as well as through state Councils of Defense and public schools, the federal government disseminated national messages surrounding food conservation and thrift. In doing so, it drew on the prior work of religious and business organizations in engaging the senses. Children stood at the center of these war mobilization strategies, representing critical targets for conservation and thrift. Relying on sources including government publications, letters, diaries, and children's poetry, this article illuminates in previously unexplored ways the extent to which federal policies infiltrated children's lives by politicizing their senses.

Literary manifestation Days of Gordana Brajovic as the initiator of literary creation by primary school students

Literary manifestation Days of Children's Poetry and Work by Gordana Brajović has been held in Aleksinac for fourteen years. During this time, twelve poetry collections appeared containing awarded and praised students' works. The literary papers are divided into three age categories: from the first to the fourth grade, from fifth to the eight grade and secondary school. Several thousand contributors from Serbia and abroad have taken part in this manifestation so far. In terms of literary genre, the first category is mostly dominated by lyrical poems. It can also be noted that at this age students use various narrative techniques as well. The second age category reports larger variety of genre through the presence of drama, report, treaty, essay and recount.

William Blake's “The Tyger”: Divine and Beastly Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Children's Poetry

One reason why William Blake's “The Tyger” seems to resist interpretation is that its connections with eighteenth-century children's poetry have not been sufficiently recovered. By reinserting “The...

The Inaugural New Writing Annual Creative Writing Lecture: Children's Poetry – Who Needs It?

Presented in June 2011 at the Great Writing International Creative Writing Conference at Imperial College, London, what follows is the text of the inaugural New Writing International Creative Writi...

Poetry for Children: Reverie and the Demand for the Teacher’s Responsibility

There are indications of a positive trend in education. International comparative investigations on academic achievement (Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA) and longitudinal studies on life courses prove the need for and the importance of children’s high intellectual knowledge. At the same time, new research initiatives and projects comply with the demand that aesthetic/cultural education1 be “more” than a marginal complement to intellectual education and instead be “fundamental for thinking and acting.”2 Aesthetic education is to provide soft skills, to shape children’s characters, and to improve their social competences, representing “the Other of school.”3 The text below deals with poetry for children. It argues that within the theory and practice of education, the historic and current discourse on poems for children links and challenges both desires: the need for intellectual and for emotional learning. According to Dieter Lenzen, modern pedagogy is based on the education theories and practices of the eighteenth century.4 The linguist, theorist, and optimist on education of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Joachim Heinrich Campe, edited literary texts, but he also wrote poems and prose for children. Campe was a member of the philanthropists whose influence on Western education is still enormous. He is the first German pedagogue who systematically discussed the problems and the qualities of poems within educational settings. Emotional, soul-touching knowledge and intellectual, scientific knowledge are not incompatible in both his writing and his acting. Considered separately, they refer to the presence of what is absent, thus Campe does not favor or abandon aesthetics or science but reconciles them—in poetry. His Abezeund Lesebuch, a book on poetry and on the theory of poetry in education, is an example of that, but its history also shows difficulties:5 to him poetry in education is not sentimental. It is neither a simple desideratum

Brave New Worlds. Old and New Classics of Children's Literatures (review)

Reviewed by: Brave New Worlds. Old and New Classics of Children's Literatures J. Igor Prieto-Arranz Brave New Worlds. Old and New Classics of Children's Literatures Ed. Elena Paruolo. Brussels: Peter Lang. 2011. 231 pages. Brave New Worlds is a careful selection of papers on European children's literature whose leitmotif is the very issue of canonicity (with)in the field. While pointing to the canon as a discursive formation, Paruolo claims in her introductory chapter that there are also clear advantages surrounding canonicity, including authors' visibility and perceived legitimacy for researchers (9-28). In the light of this perception, the volume focuses on four different countries: Britain and three important literary polysystems, namely Germany, France and Italy, which are currently in various stages of the way towards a children's literary canon. The volume is divided into three main parts. Of these, Part 1, by far the strongest section in the book, looks at the texts themselves. First, Sandra L. Beckett discusses "crossover" classics, a rare status which the author somehow connects to works having been written in, or else translated into, English (31-44). An encyclopaedic list of both past and present-day classics rounds out this chapter. The next contribution is Peter Hunt's close reading of three [End Page 83] well-known British canonical works: Carroll's Alice books and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Effectively deconstructing the notion of the canon, Hunt suggests that Alice remains a true children's work that also appeals to adults, whereas Kenneth Grahame's pastoral idyll is a novel that the adult world has systematically thought suitable for children (45-53). Jean Perrot then considers the French canon. Although going back to the 17th century, the works he identifies as French classics are more recent, including Saint-Exupéry's Le petit prince [The Little Prince] and Pergaud's La guerre des boutons [War of the buttons]. The value of this chapter lies in the rich intertextual connections delineated between these and other works within and outside the French literary polysystem (54-66). Anja Müller's equally enticing chapter takes us to Germany. Following very much the same principles successfully used in previous chapters, Müller provides an extensive revision of German children's literature since the 18th century, often considering the role played by extra-literary criteria in the creation of German children's classics. As a post-scriptum of sorts, Müller argues that the realistic mode that has characterised much of Germany's children's fiction has not been entirely superseded by the recently successful fantasy works the country has produced (67-88). From Germany the reader travels back to Britain and is invited to consider children's poetry. Morag Styles' account rejoices in the official recognition this subgenre receives in Britain whilst bitterly resenting the very little presence it has in British school curricula (89-103). Part 1 comes to a close pointing to the future with Stefania Ciocia's "Vernon God Little: A Future Crossover Classic" (105-120). Even if it has already found its place in British school curricula, the author convincingly argues, this novel may never become an established part of the children's literary canon, mostly because it lacks two essential ingredients: it does not build empathy with the main character or a sense of catharsis. Part 2 is devoted to the fascinating issue of the translation or adaptation of children's classics. A strong point of this part is that the pieces of children's literature the different chapters explore from this different perspective are works already analysed in Part 1: Alice, La guerre des boutons, and a staple of the German folk tradition compiled by the Brothers Grimm, namely "Hansel and Gretel." However, it must also be said that Serpieri's considerations on the translation of Alice, rich as they are in practical detail (and therefore of immense value for translation practitioners) lack the scholarly tone that has hitherto dominated the volume (123-139). This is equally applicable to D'Ajello's chapter on the translation of Alice into Neapolitan Italian, which becomes more of a political vindication (considering the status of...